front page  ·  comicbook reviews  ·  interviews  ·  comics  ·  merchandise  ·  contact us  ·  newsfeed: rss xml

If you seek oddness and finely crafted words in your reading, you’ll want to check out Alan Moore’s Hypothetical Lizard. The author of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen and The Courtyard has created a city named Liavek that has the eerie feel of China Miẻville’s New Crobuzon (from his Arthur-C.-Clarke-award-winning Perdito Street Station) — but without the humor.

This is an adult-oriented story, to be sure, filled with symbolic dualities. A mother sells her daughter Som-Som to The House Without Clocks — a place of prostitution. Each resident has a peculiar characteristic or ability, such as vibrating of voice to induce pain or pleasure, imitating a corpse, and changing facial features to resemble anyone. All may come in handy in such a house.

Som-Som is prepared for something special. She must be changed in order to safely have congress with wizards, who, in the apex of pleasure may blurt out mystic words that no one else should ever know or say.

Thus a physiomancer severs the physical link in Som-Som’s brain and half a mask is affixed to her head. From one side she can neither hear nor see. The process by which she thinks about what she’s going to say and what she actually says is nullified.

She is virtually separated from others by her dichotomization, for she can no longer speak nor process what she hears. But in her observances of the people about her, and from the words of those who freely confide in her, she has a perspective allowing her to understand her fellow beings more than they can understand themselves.

A secondary storyline involves Rawra Chin and one who loves her. She is a house denizen who possesses special attributes that contribute to her drive for success. This first issue leaves one wondering what is next for Som-Som and delves deeper into the charismatic Rawra Chin.

Sample Quote: “The common bond shared by all those who admired this charisma within Rawra Chin was that none of them could precisely define it. It remained a mystery, overwhelmingly tangible, eternally ungraspable.”